10,000 Lives Lost in Serbian Purge, Britain Estimates

As Russian and U.S. negotiators struggled through the night here to settle a last major issue blocking agreement on Russia’s role in the Kosovo peacekeeping effort, a senior British official in London suggested Thursday that as many as 10,000 ethnic Albanians may have perished during the “ethnic cleansing” carried out by Serbs over the past few months.

“Tragically, our estimates of the numbers of innocent men, women and children killed will almost certainly have to be revised upwards,” declared Geoff Hoon, a minister of state in the British Foreign Office. “According to the reports we had gathered, mostly from the refugees, it appeared that around 10,000 people had been killed in more than 100 massacres. The final total may be much worse.”

Hoon, who made his remarks to reporters at a formal briefing, said the killings appeared to have been carried out mainly by Yugoslav security forces, including the paramilitary police know by the acronym MUP. “It is still hard to credit that our fellow human beings could be guilty of machine-gunning children, systematic rape of young women and girls, digging mass graves and burning bodies to try to conceal the evidence of murder,” he said. “But this all happened in Kosovo.”

Hoon also reported that British troops in Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, found what appears to have been a torture center used by Yugoslav forces. The facility was filled with an array of “primitive, brutal weapons” and bloodied bandages.

Britain has the largest contingent of troops in the international peacekeeping force that began deploying Saturday in Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia’s dominant republic, Serbia. The British also have taken control of Kosovo’s most populous region, which includes Pristina.

In other developments Thursday:

* Western officials reported a sharp increase in the departure of Yugoslav forces. About 32,000 of the estimated 40,000 soldiers and interior police have left the province since the weekend. Southern Kosovo has been emptied of Yugoslav troops, the officials said, and the province’s central belt is rapidly emptying.

* U.S. forces have swelled. About 3,800 Marines and Army soldiers have now entered the province, nearly all of a vanguard “enabling force.” They will be relieved in several weeks by a second-phase force of 7,000.

* The International Committee of the Red Cross reported that about 40,000 of Kosovo’s estimated 200,000 Serbian residents had left the province, many fearing retribution from returning ethnic Albanians. The Serbian government in Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital, joined NATO and U.N. leaders in efforts to dissuade the province’s Serbs. State television aired a special 20-minute call-in program Thursday night in which British Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson, the peacekeeping force’s commander, and Sergio Vieira de Mello, the special U.N. envoy to Kosovo, assured Serbs through an interpreter that their forces would work to pacify the province. “Let’s have no more refugees,” Jackson said.

* State Department spokesman James P. Rubin is scheduled to travel today to Macedonia for talks with Hashim Thaci, political leader of the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army, on demilitarization of the rebel group. U.S. officials said that with the withdrawal of the last Yugoslav forces, scheduled to occur Sunday night, and agreement near on the composition of the international peacekeeping force, demilitarization is the next logical step. Russia has pressured the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to disarm the rebels, who Russia charges have seized towns in the province with NATO’s acquiescence. The ethnic Albanian guerrillas have threatened to attack Russian peacekeeping troops.

* U.S. officials said American troops released six KLA leaders who were led away in handcuffs on Wednesday after a confrontation with a Marine unit. The KLA members had refused to turn over their arms, until the Marines threatened them and their force with armored personnel carriers and helicopter gunships.

Hoon’s claim of widespread killings in Kosovo appeared to bear out a prediction made late last week by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that peacekeepers, once on the scene, might find the province’s humanitarian nightmare even greater than feared.

Hours after Hoon delivered his chilling report, Albright, along with Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, fought to prevent a collapse of talks with their Russian counterparts on Moscow’s role in the NATO-led peacekeeping effort, known as Kosovo Force, or KFOR. Assuring some kind of participation for Russian troops is viewed as essential for a stable peace in the region. Russians have historical and cultural ties with Serbs, who are a minority in Kosovo province but dominate Yugoslavia.

The intensity of Russia’s desire to be a part of the peacekeeping operation was underscored Saturday when a column of about 200 Russian paratroops abandoned their peacekeeping duties in Bosnia-Herzegovina and stunned NATO by driving unannounced into Kosovo and taking up positions at Pristina’s airport. They remained there Thursday, much to the alliance’s chagrin.

U.S. and Russian officials insisted that they had made progress in two days of detailed talks here on two crucial issues blocking Russian participation: assuring at least some permanent role for Russian forces at Pristina’s airport and acceptance by Moscow of NATO’s demand that all peacekeeping forces in the province come under the command of Jackson, the British general. Officials refused to give details about agreements on these key issues.

Despite the progress, negotiations nearly broke off late Thursday when Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov notified Albright that he and Defense Minister Igor D. Sergeyev were returning home immediately.

Albright “called Ivanov and said, ‘Stay put, I’m going to come over there and let’s see if we can stay here and work this out,’ ” a senior State Department official said.

After a flurry of telephone calls, Cohen and Sergeyev appeared before television cameras on the steps of Finland’s presidential palace to announce that their officials would work through the night, then present them with revised proposals to work on early today.

What still divided the two sides was the remaining issue of just how and where Russian troops ticketed by Moscow for Kosovo duty would fit into the NATO structure. Russia has demanded a sector of its own, as the Americans, British, French, Germans and Italians now have. Cohen and Albright have spoken of more vaguely defined “areas of responsibility” for Moscow’s troops.

Russia had initially proposed sending as many as 10,000 troops to Kosovo, but officials say it is now more likely to send a force of 2,500 to 3,000.

Pentagon spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon described the negotiations as “down to very specific military details.” Other senior U.S. officials said the two sides late Thursday were discussing a proposal that would effectively scatter Russian troops through the existing five sectors held by NATO nations.

Speaking with reporters at the end of a one-day visit to Paris, President Clinton said the negotiators in Helsinki had made “very substantive progress on very important issues. . . . I think we’ll bring this to a successful conclusion in the next little while--the next day or so I think we’ll get it worked out.”

Even if an agreement is reached here today, it must still be approved by NATO ambassadors in Brussels and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin.

The proposal of dispersing Russian troops throughout the five existing sectors seemed at odds with a position staked out only hours earlier in Moscow by Yeltsin, who insisted that Russia be assigned its own sector in Kosovo where it can station peacekeepers.

While other top Russian officials had signaled a willingness in recent days to accept the placement of Russian troops in zones controlled by NATO countries, Yeltsin seemed to want none of it.

“They [NATO leaders] have been reluctant to give a sector to Russia,” Yeltsin said in brief television footage released by the Kremlin. “The president categorically disagrees and will look for ways to counteract it.”

The slow pace of the talks left open the possibility that disagreement over Russia’s role in the peacekeeping force may not be resolved until Sunday, when Yeltsin is scheduled to arrive in Cologne, Germany, to meet with Clinton and other world leaders.

*

Marshall reported from Helsinki, Paddock from Moscow and Stobart from London. Times staff writers Richard Boudreaux in Belgrade, Paul Richter in Washington and James Gerstenzang in Paris contributed to this report.

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REBUILDING KOSOVO

The Peacekeepers: Who They Are, What Their Roles Will Be

The international peacekeeping operation that continues to move into Kosovo will eventually be made up of about 48,000 troops. The force--known as KFOR, or Kosovo Force--has a multitude of duties while in the province, but its primary task will be to provide security for the region. The peacekeepers will eventually be replaced by long-term U.N. humanitarian aid workers and a police force.

The major countries taking part in the peacekeeping operation have been assigned to five sectors of responsibility in Kosovo. In addition, air and ground safety zones have been established around Kosovo to prevent Yugoslav forces from entering the territory or firing on NATO aircraft.

The NATO-led peacekeepers are working under a document called the Military Technical Agreement, which outlines the details of the Yugoslav withdrawal and KFOR responsibilities. The peacekeepers are composed of a variety of military personnel and civil engineers, who have the power to detain and arrest opposition forces if necessary. Demilitarizing the rebels of the Kosovo Liberation Army is one of KFOR’s duties; another is removing land mines from routes leading into the peacekeeping regions. Duties of the peacekeepers include